Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Correct Lens Distortion in GIMP with GimpLensfun

While GIMP offers a wide range of tools for working with photos, it
lacks one feature that is essential for serious photographers: the
ability to automatically fix lens distortion. Fortunately, the GimpLensfun plugin fills the void quite nicely. As the name suggests, the plugin uses the excellent LensFun
library as its back end. One way to install the plugin is to compile it
from source. Start with installing the required packages. On Ubuntu,
this can be done using the following command:

Grab then the latest source code from the project's GitHub repository:

git clone git://github.com/seebk/GIMP-Lensfun.git

Switch to the GIMP-Lensfun directory and run the make command to compile the plugin:

cd GIMP-Lensfun
make

Move then the compiled gimp-lensfun plugin to the ~/.gimp-2.x/plug-ins/
directory, and you are done. If you don't feel like getting your hands
dirty compiling the plugin, you can grab the latest tarball from the
project's website. The archive contains compiled versions of the plugin
stored in the /bin/linux directory.

Once the plugin has been installed it can be accessed via the Filters | Enhance | GimpLensfun
menu. The plugin automatically reads the lens and camera model along
with the corresponding parameters from the photo's EXIF data, so all you
need to do is to hit OK to apply lens correction.